Variety Flowers with 1st Grade

At the beginning of the year I sent a letter out to families talking about who I was, my philosophy, and things they could donate. Donations came pouring in pretty consistently after that. I now have more toilet paper rolls than I know what to do with! One of the other items that I got an overload of was cereal boxes. In search of something to do with them I stumbled upon this great project via this post on pinterest. Per usual, I wanted to change it up and and teach a concept with it. A bonus of this project was that they were currently learning about flowers and flower parts in their classroom. Complete coincidence but I loved it! Would love if it happened more on purpose!

I CAN statement: I CAN create a variety of flowers using oil pastels.

Day 1: Started the class talking about variety. What does variety look like? Why would an artist use it? Etc. Then I showed them this image that I stumbled upon while looking for resources for this project. It was a great example of all the different possibilities of flowers including sizes and colors.

After we looked at these I did a demonstration of how to do three different flowers but explained they were not limited to the ones I showed them. For the flowers we were using oil pastels, so in my demonstration I showed them how they could blend colors for the flowers. There was a lot of excitement during that part of the demo :) The only requirement was 10 DIFFERENT flowers so we had the most variety. They did them without pencil and filled a page with them like my example below. Before they started working they had to finish part of their previous project so they were working for the entire class.

Day 2: Showed them the above image once again and asked what variety meant. A lot did not remember the word,  but remembered what it meant. Woohoo! We looked closely at my example and talked about constructing the "garden". Flowers should hang off the top and could overlap and each should have a piece of string for the stems. They continued making flowers and after 10 were done they had to cut them out removing all the white space and then assembled them. Cereal boxes were cut into thirds and one side of the box was used so it could stand open. We pre-painted the boxes for students to save time  because we were getting close to the end of the year but I would have them paint them themselves on the first day we started.

Make sense now?

Day 3: One more work day was needed for many students so while they were working on finishing they had an extension project of drawing made up  object flowers. I will share some images of those images later ;)

One of my 1st grades was a lot more behind than the others and I use YouTube videos as a reward with them so I ended up finding this after we were done with the other classes. Wish I would of found it sooner and shown it to the other classes. SO COOL.

Very happy with how these turned out. If we were not so close to the end of the year and had more time, I would of liked to see a little more time taken drawing the coloring the flowers and I should of done some color concepts for blending but overall it was a success in my book. Also, really fun to display, especially with the Kindergarten Recycled Flowers :)

McDill Elementary...

Jefferson Elementary...

Kennedy Elementary...